Liberal humbug about Africa
Richard West
The tenth anniversary of the start of the civil war in Nigeria has arrived, most approp riately, when most of black Africa is in chaos and Britain is acting as host to the ludicrous Comm6nwealth Conference. The state of Biafra, formed by the Ibos and other peoples of south-eastern Nigeria, was the first and probably the last true nation in that unhappy continent and might, had it survived, have proved Africans capable of good government. However a British Labour regime, obsequious to the petrol and palm oil companies, combined with the Soviet Union to arm and encourage Federal Nigeria in a long, gruesome war of attrition. After two and a half years resistance, at a cost of millions of lives — mostly of women and children — Biafra was forced back into the pseudo-state of Nigeria.
This abominable war aroused virtually no concern, even interest in Britain, the country largely responsible for it. When I came back from Biafra, more shocked than I had ever been in Vietnam, I found that Fleet Street was much more interested in some squabble over Anguilla. The editor of a 'left-wing' weekly dismissed, an article in defence of Biafra with the remark: 'Don't you realise that people like Auberon Waugh are on your side?' I did, and largely due to the experience of Biafra, I have come to share Auberon Waugh's utter detestation of most senior British politicians with the exception of those few, such as Hugh Fraser (Conservative) and Frank Allaun (Labour) who questioned the scabrous Realpolitik of the City and the Foreign Office.
Looking back on the war, one feels little bitterness against those businesses and individuals who stood to gain by a Nigerian victory: Shell, BP, Unilever, the Galitzine PR men and John Cordle MP. Far more dangerous were those politicians, journalists, civil servants and publicists of the type who used to be called the Friends of Africa. Then as now they combined a conviction that they knew best what was good for Africa with an unconscious but strong sense of racial superiority. I say unconscious because most 'friends of Africa' are liberal or left-wing in their politics. In theory they are as colour-blind as those Christian missionaries whom they so much resembled who, in the nineteenth century, bullied the Africans into accepting a different set of alien beliefs.
Today the 'friends of Africa' insist that Africans must accept either a parliamentary or a Marxist democracy; that they must live within the boundaries marked by the former colonial powers and that, as far as possible they must forget their divisive `tri bar differences. In the interests of these principles, the Biafrans had to be crushed although they differ utterly from western and northern Nigerians in race, language, social system, religious belief and culture. The liberal left did not realise this, noticing only that both sides were black.
The racial arrogance of the 'friends of Africa' was clearly expressed in their calls on the Biafrans to surrender. Now, as it turned out, the Nigerians did win in the end and the Biafrans would have been better off had they surrendered earlier. But they did not know this at the time. Almost any losing side in a war would have done better to surrender, just as any winning side would have done better to hold on. *What made this civil war different was that the white liberal left refused to believe that the Biafrens wanted to go on fighting, as for example, the Boers or the Irish wanted to go on fighting. It was not thought conceivable that Africans might believe in a cause to the extent of starving and seeing their children starve. Therefore continued resistance had to be explained away as the result of propaganda and terror by the Biafran leadership.
This racial arrogance of the liberal whites has had disastrous results in other African Commonwealth countries, and in the now embattled Rhodesia. The British liberal attitude to Rhodesia, as represented by all three parties in Parliament, combines two conflicting ideas about the African population. It has been implicit in British policy that the blacks might suddenly rise and commit a. massacre of the whites. It was because of this that just after UDI, when the British set up a radio station to broadcast into Rhodesia, the programmes were given in English only and not one of the two main African languages. It was probably for the same reason that British troops were not sent to crush UDI: the government was afraid of the African reaction.
This partly explains why last year, after Kissinger's trip to Africa, the British refused to send in troops to Rhodesia to hold the peace for a year or two until a majority government had been formed. Of course, Callaghan also said that Britain was too short of money and troops to fulfil its responsibility to its former colony, but I suspect that he also funked the political challenge.
For besides distrusting the black Rhodesians, the Friends of Africa have insisted that they must have a Parliamentary democracy on the principle of 'one man one vote'. Yet although the blacks are politically aware, in the sense that they want good and just government, there is no reason to think that they want a Westminster Parliament, still less a Marxist regime as in neighbouring Angola and Mozambique. They would probably like the kind of oneparty but tolerant system that now pertains in Zambia and Tanzania.
The British parliamentary system has not worked in Africa except for the tiny Gambia. The attempt to impose it on Rhodesia will only infuriate the whites and make them more stubborn. If British governments over the last ten years had not been crazed by liberal humbug they would have dropped all the wrangling over a constitution, held a referendum and allowed the Rhodesian people to choose the leader they want, who would almost certainly be a reasonable man of the centre.
The racial arrogance of the 'friends of Africa' has been seen at its very worst in the treatment of Uganda. As soon as Amin seized power, the British Foreign Office and its obedient hacks in the Press and the BBC were eager to present him as a comically stupid, jovial African of the kind that other Africans love. When he threw out the Asians in 1972, it was widely reported that this was a popular move, although almost all the Ugandans I spoke to deplored it and prophesied (rightly) that it would bankrupt the country, Those who dared even to discuss the subject said they feared and disliked Amin. The hostility of the Kampala crowd was easy to see when Amin held a ceremony to receive his fellow gangster President (soon to be Emperor), Bokassa of the Central African Republic (soon to be Empire).
The recent calls for a boycott of Uganda, following the arrest there of a Leyland representative, bring back to mind a story that may be pertinent today. In September 1972, when -Amin had already massacred thousands of enemies and was threatening to shoot English 'spies', I met in my small hotel in Kampala two nervous representatives of the Alvis company, then as now a Leyland subsidiary. They told Me that in the last few weeks, their company had sent to Uganda a large number of Saracen and Saladin armoured cars, which were now at Jinja. They were supposed to train the Ugandan troops in the use of these vehicles but had been warned that it might be dangerous to drive to Jinja past sentries anxious to shoot British 'spies'.
Eventually the two Leyland men left for England and I left for Nairobi with what imagined the fairly exciting scoop that British armoured cars were still being sent to Uganda. I telephoned the Sunday Times, gave them as many names and particulars as I knew of the Leyland deal, and suggested they ring Alvis in Coventry for their comments. On Saturday morning, I rang the Sunday Times and was told that they had not used the story as they had had 'no spare reporter to telephone Coventry'. Next week I tried the Observer who also refused to publish on the grounds that the story 'did not stand up'. This struck me and still strikes me as rather rum.
Previous page
